Bunker Hill

son gets corroboration of sorts in Samuel Swett’s
History of Bunker Hill
, which includes a reference to Warren’s visit to Jeffries (p. 58). Another intriguing reference comes from the loyalist Peter Oliver, who writes of “a gentleman who was tampered with by . . . Major Genl. Warren. . . . Warren was in hopes to take this gentleman into their number, and laid open their whole scheme. He told him that ‘Independence was their object; that it was supposed that Great Britain would resent it and would lay the town of Boston in ashes, from their ships; that an estimate had accordingly been made of the value of the estates in town; and that they had determined to pay the losses of their friends from the estates of the loyalists in the country.’ The gentleman refused to join with them, but Warren replied that they would pursue their scheme” (
OPAR
, p. 148). Was Jeffries the “gentleman” referred to by Oliver? If he was, the midnight conversation between the two men appears to have been in line with the earlier impression Timothy Pickering had of Warren after the post–Lexington and Concord meeting on April 20 in Cambridge.
    The May 30, 1775, espionage report to Gage describing the North End as “a nest of very wicked fellows” is in
PIR
, 3:1994–95. The espionage report claiming that “the men that go in the ferry-boats are not faithful” is in
PIR
, 4:2776–77. John Adams’s memory of how Joseph Warren spoke of “the selfishness of this people, or their impatient eagerness for commissions” is in a February 18, 1811, letter to Josiah Quincy in his
Works
, 9:633; in the same letter Adams also makes the claim that “there is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America . . . the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest.” John Bell’s July 30, 2006, entry to his blog
Boston 1775
describes how John Jeffries worked the British patronage system once he moved to London after the evacuation of Boston (http://boston1775.blogspot.com/2006/07/dr-john-jeffries-physician-loyalist_30.html). Edmund Morgan in
Inventing the People
writes of how the “decline of deference and emergence of leadership signaled the beginnings . . . [of] a new way of determining who should stand among the few to govern the many” (p. 302). Joseph Warren’s May 14, 1775, letter to Samuel Adams in which he writes of his hope that in the future “the only road to promotion may be through the affection of the people. This being the case, the interest of the governor and the governed will be the same” is reprinted in Frothingham’s
LJW
, pp. 483–84.
    The statement that Warren had “fully resolved that his future service should be in the military line” is also in
LJW
, p. 510, as is the statement that Warren was “proposed as a physician-general; but preferring a more active and hazardous employment, he accepted a major-general’s commission” (p. 504). Allen French writes that the “choice of Joseph Warren [as major general] was strange. . . . Not one high office had yet been given to an inexperienced man. . . . But such were his enthusiasm and magnetism, and so great was the confidence felt in his talents and devotion, that the position was given him, with tragic results” (
FYAR
, pp. 72–73). French claims that Warren’s only relevant experience was his time with the Committee of Safety but makes no reference to his conspicuous role on April 19 and his presence at the skirmishes at Grape Island and Chelsea Creek. French also writes of Heath’s less than enthusiastic reaction to Warren’s elevation to major general despite Warren’s letter to him “urging him to apply for his colonelcy. . . . Stubbornly, perhaps, Heath made no move” (p. 73). Warren’s June 16, 1775, letter to Heath is reprinted in
LJW
, p. 507. In his June 16 diary entry Ezekiel Price writes, “Colonel Richmond from the Congress says that Dr. Warren was chosen a major-general; that Heath was not chosen any office, but it was supposed that no difficulty would arise from it” (p. 190). John Adams’s statement that Joseph Warren “made a harangue in the form of a charge . . . to every officer, upon the delivery of his commission, and that he never failed to make the officer as well as all the assembly shudder” is in
Works
, 3:12.
    Allen French writes of the June 13 warning from the New Hampshire Committee of Safety about a report from “a gentleman of undoubted veracity” concerning an attack on